


Reverie

by newcanaan



Category: The Magnus Archives
Genre: Dissociation, some descriptions of violence and death, unreality TW
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:07:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24423994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newcanaan/pseuds/newcanaan
Summary: Set during the first season let’s say, an enquiry on the nature of remembering
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

Statement of Eleanor Kidd, regarding a series of memories supposedly belonging to somebody else. Original statement taken October 24th, 2012. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins:

So . . . this is it then? What do you even want me to say?

_When was your earliest memory of this happening?_

I don’t know. Can’t tell you exactly. I think it’s just something I’ve always done. Like something that came to life before I did, and I was just born into it. I don’t know – my parents and I – I don’t know.  
I remember them taking us on our first holiday to the seaside, sunburnt on the beach at Brighton, and before we even got there knowing what the sea was. Not just in the way kids draw a blue line on some paper at primary school. I swore I’d seen so many miles of the water, that if the wind dropped we’d be so far from anything that even knew the roots of language they wouldn’t find us for hundreds of years. That’s not normal, is it, a four year old knowing that?  
My parents took this photo of me on the pier, with a thousand yard stare they said. Suppose they thought it was funny. I wish they wouldn’t. [Sighs] 

_And you told them about what you thought you remembered?_

Of course not. Never told them much at all. And when I was old enough to understand that most people didn’t dream these sorts of things, it made it worse, made it worse for them too.  
I wasn’t an easy child, I knew that. Always so anxious something was about to happen, something worse than I could even comprehend, and I spent most of my nights hyperventilating under my quilt. When I wasn’t I had these . . . summers of a sadness so absolute I thought it would last forever, even when I was dead and buried. Pretty morbid I suppose.  
I don’t know what happened. It felt as if part of myself had been amputated. My mother didn’t listen. I couldn’t control the worry or the crying, and at night I would just lie in bed blinking these . . . tears of rage because everyone was asking me questions but wouldn’t listen to the answer.

[Voice softens] In the memories, though, there was clarity, there was wholeness. I knew in this other . . . I had lost something, something irreplaceable, but knowing that at least I had a reason to feel the way I had. It was a name I knew and it was not.  
And all these things I couldn’t know, names of places and friends I could still remember, I had somehow lived beyond them all.  
My dad took me and my brothers to Portsmouth once and got lost down near the seafront. And the gulls were screaming and my brothers rolling their eyes and I told him the way to go, something in my body started moving the right direction, but everything there had changed. It feels terrible, going back to somewhere that was once your home, and not knowing your way around.

_And the incident with Jeremy Delaney?_

That was a long time ago.

_I can keep it off the record._

It’s fine. I had just not thought about it for a long time. My brother took the fall for me, two weeks of detention and no football after school on the green. He was always good like that.  
It’s not as if Jeremy was hurt or anything, God knows he could’ve used being brought down a peg or two though. I was only ten years old. He’d taken his dads Swiss army knife from his office and was showing it to the boys. Jeremy was like that. He had to show them all that he was like that.

And when he cornered me at the fence when I was waiting for Dan, he put it against my throat and I just – I didn’t even think about what was happening. But the knife hit the floor and I had his arm twisted against his back. He let out a scream, the kind of scream boys that have won their whole life do when they lose for the first time. I kicked the knife away. His dad must have given him hell for that. Anyway, he immediately told the headmaster, but Dan saw how upset I was and stepped in. I thin k of everyone in the family, Danny might just be the only good one.  
We shared a room growing up – there’s only a year between us – and he said he woke up some nights and saw me standing at the window sleepwalking. He’d lead me back to bed to make sure I didn’t get cold. I haven’t spoken to him for a while. I hope he’s alright.

[Takes a drink]

_Should you be drinking that?_

Should any of us?

[There is a pause.]

I’ll be fine. I’m guessing you want to know for your statement, the doctors and the diagnoses. I really did try to get better. And I’m sure that must colour your impression of me, mental illness and happy pills and the lobotomising of the mind that comes with all that. But you’ve dealt with it all, surely, ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night, right?

_Something like that._

One doctor thought I might be dissociating, but it’s not like that, not like staring at the wall for three hours in a bath towel because I’m not sure where I am. And I know that feeling. I lived it for ten or more years.

They said it was the brain’s way of protecting itself, making it seem like you’re not yourself anymore, but that wasn’t true, it was . . . parts of myself I had forgotten about had woken up, and I felt more whole than I had ever been in my life and all the pain and the terror were pieces of a long history culminating in me in that exact moment in time and I . . .  
[Breathes] How could I tell some stranger that? I just took the prescription and didn’t go back.

_And you’re still medicated now?_

For the most part. It makes me kind of . . . flat. Somehow that’s worse.  
So I’ll go back to the beach sometimes and read or watch the water. That’s the thing about the sea, it doesn’t stare back at you. There’s a relief to not being looked at, a lot of girls feel that too I imagine.

_And you’re still dreaming about it? About . . . what exactly?_

. . . History . . . the water . . . the goddamn letters. I know it all. I lived it, those were my memories and it is my grief. Existing alongside everything real, anyway. But at the end of it all, who’s to say what’s real and what’s not? The older I get, I swear the less I understand about the world. And now the doctors have made me – numb. And these memories seem more extant than the real ones. Was I ever even young? 

Last night I dreamt of how I died.

[Another pause.]

_When did you find the letters?_

[Takes a breath] We were clearing out the attic for mum, Jay and me, they were sat on a stack of boxes of Christmas decorations or some shite, like they were waiting to be found. It was just a bundle of envelopes tied together. I’m surprised they didn’t fall to pieces. All of them addressed to some woman named Annalise. I don’t know, everything becomes so muddled.  
It was around that time I had to go into hospital for a while.

But when I tried to search the address, there were no records of a house ever being there. Maybe your people will have more look.

_Our people being Martin? I don’t know about that .Do you know anything else about the place?_

I don’t know how but I . . . I remember what it looked like when we were younger. I remember walking past through the grass, waiting to catch the rabbits before they ate the flowers.  
There isn’t much standing there now. Jay found it all very sad, but I think I’d prefer it that way. Some things are better left for history.

I brought them in for you, but please don’t photocopy them, the light damages them too.

_Too?_

. . . I should probably be going . . . it’s pissing it down and I need to call for a ride.

Before I go I meant to ask, why did you call me in again? Last time I was here it was for what, ten minutes? My mother thought it was a therapy thing, let’s just say her appreciation for the NHS went through the roof after she picked me up.

_Well, now you’ve brought material to back the validity of your statements. And you’re not the only one who dreams of the past, Miss Kidd._

So you’ve found more? I guess I should take ‘one of a kind’ off my resume.

[The door opens] And can I ask – what are they like?

_[A pause] Like you._

I see . . .

Have fun with the letters then, I guess. I’ll collect them in two weeks?

_Are you sure you want to go out in that rain –_

[Door closes.]

Statement ends.

-

Dearest Anna,  
I hope that wherever this may find you, that you are happy. When Alice was born she seemed too small for the blankets they wrapped her in. Benjamin held her there until it was morning, but I am sure that you know this by now. I think from the first moment you felt her kicking you knew she would cause an irrevocable plague of love to spread through the house. I am sorry to see it has become a cruel kind of love left there now, between the doorways and the empty rooms and the kitchen we once thought was the heart of the us.  
Please do not think it selfish of me for leaving. I had begged her to come with me, or to beg for me to stay, but she has only found herself knitting by the window for a fortnight now and she does not even look up when I speak to her. You were always the better of two halves. I think that was the moment I knew I could no longer stay in a house so full of ghosts.

When I had asked Benjamin if he wanted to join me on the journey, he told me he had to stay with his wife and child. He was a casket bearer on the morning. I am glad you chose a man such as him to spend your life with. And when I was on the roof watching and drinking the last of father’s reserves, I wonder if this is what life may be measured by, a procession of thirteen mourners on Gypsy Lane. If the world had known you wholly, they would have flooded the streets of Portsmouth with their grief. This leaded weight I have in my chest, it is a rock I will carry around the earth with me, always moving, always bearing itself down on my shoulder. 

Since we have left for the water, I have discovered a streak of rage I never knew I possessed – one I am sure somehow does not belong to me – that has found its way into my nights, waiting wordlessly. It is like nothing I have ever known; something that could not be smothered by those blue hours of the sky in which to dedicate grief. Instead I have let these revulsions of rage plague me when they may, and if the other men have known me to lie awake they do not say a word of it, or a word of anything, but the thought of home.

I recall when we were younger and the tanner’s wife would sit and read to us in the drawing room above the shop, but that was when our world was only the rooftops and markets and stealing from the navy dogs. The stories seemed so full of light beyond the brackish horizon of the town. I wonder if when I reach the New World, I will see colours I have never dreamed of, and I will imagine you there beside me to see it too; but the world so far has only been made in shades of blue and there are mornings when I do not know where the sea ends and the sky begins.  
That was the first time I saw you, before the golden light had broken out and returned the certainty of a something besides the water, some discernible and forgiving. We had been sent aboveboard to manoeuvre a growing storm – the likes of which I had never seen before in England, but the seasoned men swore was nothing compared to those of the tropics.  
We were watching for the first signs of light from those eternities of sea blue, and you stood looking back at the water, and looked back at me, and every string in my body that had been keeping me together breathed a sigh of relief. I could do nothing but stand in admiration of such an apparition of love. Your eyes, they had never changed, or the crease above your nose when you would laugh, and it is bizarre to me to think that I might look the same to you.  
When the mourning and the exhaustion overcome me, I remember those days we looked so alike we would change clothes to confuse mother, or when you cut off your hair with the kitchen scissors. There was a wholeness to you that seemed so quiet in myself. Perhaps some people are just not meant to stand on their feet in such a way. That is why I am always running forward, or away.  
Perhaps you were right, and we came into this world as two sides of the same coin. I wish that we could be children again.  
But when you reached out to touch the sea foam, you were gone, and the first morning light broke out into the sky.

The further it has been since we left Portsmouth, the more I understand the necessity of writing. The fellow sailors who have a handle on literacy write home every night, and the ones that cannot read a word listen to them instead when the water is calm. Until now, I had not known that such an extent of longing and uncertainty could be shared through their quiet words.  
Since the Lady Miller found me in the galley hammock that night, she has been showing me the beginnings of navigation herself; the captain told me that she ought to have the mind of the sea birds for her talents, and that to have a woman like her onboard was not such an unusual thing. I am sure these beliefs may instil a fear in the men at times. One of them told a story of a man being thrown overboard because his mother had named him Jonah, but the captain seems to allow the telling of these tales if it keeps us in good enough spirits.  
I am lucky to be surrounded by such kindness. And I would have written to you sooner, but the lady has been patiently leading me through the many books in the captain’s quarters, despite my impatience to write myself.

Only the other night I was drifting in and out with the paper on my chest, but whatever it was I might have said seemed to sit in my stomach and seize them with something the sea knew too. Then I heard the water reaching in from the bottom of the deck, and soon the waves were rising past the sleeping men and drowning them softly, but they did not say a word of it. When the water frothed it sounded like the dogs they shot on that morning of the bonfire. And you were laying below me in the seawater like the beds we used to sleep in, but your eyes were open and you sat up to pull me under and I died screaming. There are mornings I forget the smell of the salt and the ocean strikes the boat back as punishment. When we reach Havana, will they say the same there? That they are haunted by something they can never escape? All we may know then is the salt and the woodsmoke, the way soldiers return from the war in a state of shock and cannot remember their homes. We will spend the night like the insomniacs wandering under the trees and listening to the sounds of the forest.

Will you be waiting for me there, Anna, will we be safe there at last? 

All my love, James


	2. Chapter 2

Letter addressed to Annalise Kidd, written circa 1700, from somewhere across the Atlantic. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Dearest Anna,

There is a place outside of Portsmouth called the Point of No Return, and although I had heard of it for so long I could not have expected the trepidation I felt at the sight of those three obsidian needles rising from the water. Once out onto the open water, there was little a crew would do to turn back, no matter what sickness or weakness of the mind. The Spanish waters have become muddled with the English here, and no man-of-war on the horizon seems less of a threat than the one before it in an open hunting ground.

Two of the crew had become ill overnight with a fever and we had had to tend to them around the clock. The captain and many others must have already seen enough turmoil in their own voyages that they seem to be immune to any illness from the farthest corners of the world. The rest of us, mostly Portsmouth boys that still shake at the sight of Spanish colours, we have sectioned ourselves off at night in the hold.

In the middle of the night, strangled by their body’s fire and the liquid sitting in their lungs, they began to cry out like drunkards that they want to go home. The captain had said something about them needing to return to land.   
By the next morning, they were still again, but even when we bound them for the sea to take back, the smell of malignant sweat remained hanging in the air. It has tried to smother us in our sleep with the warm hands of a lover. There is a part of me that believes I would like to let it, even if it is only out of a morbid loneliness. Once we had crossed the precipice though, a shudder of relief had passed through me and the candlelight had burned any remnants of the disease away. When we leave a place, I wondered, does that version of yourself die with it? Will you ever be the same again? Perhaps we only turn over and over in the cycle of change, restless as we might be. And that ghost of us is stood there for an eternity mumbling and remembering. Did you?

When I slept last night – yes, I have slept since I last wrote – I dreamt one of the dead men climbed aboard and crawled over me. I cannot begin to describe the weight of his drowned arm over me. But his eyes were closed and I hope that he had finally found some peace there beside me. Ever since that day, when you were half-adrift in the hold yourself, perhaps you too may understand the way the sea carries us to sleep so easily. Is that why mothers rock their babies, why we return the dead to the sea? We always return to where we came from. Some of the other crew aboard have talked of the unspoken magnetism of some places; they told us young ones that some people are drawn to some parts of the earth for reasons they cannot explain or understand, that history is set already and we will find ourselves there regardless of how far we run from it. Then again, the earth is a circle, isn’t it?   
And what were we looking for in the New World, he’d asked us, fame, money, war, those were all natural instincts. They seem so material now, as quick to lose as they are found. A chest of a fortune can be thrown overboard and never seen again. His eyes are sad with age and his hands shake from the whiskey. I told him, I suppose, more than anything because I felt sorry for him, that I was looking for a world better than the one I had left behind, and his own spirit became heartbroken all at once. Some people seem to emit their souls from their bodies that way, the way they shine. I should ask him what colour is mine, but I think these are the things we find for ourselves. The two of us, I am sure, are from much the same light. I know you told me that human beings are not made to live under a shadow, although I sympathise now with what must exist under the water, living in the shadow of a shadow, and I feel you walking beside me when I am alone on the deck.

It does not do well to dwell on the past. You exist in no other place now, those memories fortified by the knowledge that they are the only ones that remain. The lady told me one night that she too lost a sister, a very long time ago. She was only a young girl at the time and her sister had burned from the inside out. When disease spread through the body the body fought back, but there isn’t a war in the world that was won without a price. She had fallen asleep holding her hand and half-alight with humoral fire, and in the morning her sister was so wrought with rigor mortis she could not pry her hand free. She had sat there in a depressed complacency, she said, because that undeniable mantra of her thoughts had told her that that was exactly where she was meant to be.

The living are not meant to sleep with the dead, she said. That night I was sick as a dog over the side of the hull. More often than not now she has invited me to the captains quarters to read with her at night, to pour over Gilgamesh or Homer or whatever it was next, that is, should the men not need me aboveboard. She has seemed distant recently, wandering off to some place inside herself only she knows about, until the captain comes beside her and they melt into one another without a word. I wonder if I will ever know a love like that, as you did. It has been days now since the sickness passed but a hush has fallen over the ship. The inimitable dreams of whatever waited at the other side of the water have slipped away from us in the night. To pursue something with such hope means releasing the ropes of whatever ideal it could be when it was still only a hope. What will be waiting for us, one of the men asked, that England had not already suffered? I find myself watching the water alone at night, waiting to feel your arm around me that never really comes.

I often think whether or not you imagine the same. And what it may be like there, with Alice and the family you might find, whether it is bright or blue or cold still. I do not know if there are days or nights or letter-openers, still I hope you have heard from me all the same. I take the dawn sun to be a sign. And Alice – does she cry for you when she is alone? Or maybe it is quiet there. It will be light soon and I must go see to the ship again. 

Love dearly,

James


	3. Chapter 3

Statement of Enid Farthing, regarding an account written by her late husband. Original statement taken February 17th, 1998. Audio recording by Gertrude Robinson, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins:

Thank you for seeing me – I didn’t know where else to go for this sort of thing. Before I begin I don’t expect any sympathies, my husband’s death was a long time coming. Don’t get me wrong, I miss him more than I thought it might be humanly possible to miss, but, well, he wasn’t really himself in the end there.  
No, I lost him years ago, I think. It’s been too long spent grieving for the man sat in the corner of the dining room, and anyone expressing their condolences . . . it only aggravates the outline of him there. Gnarled, and sad, and not sure who he ever was to begin with.  
But never angry though, Antonov didn’t have that sort of temper in him. Remembering, on the other hand, he had something much more complicated when it came to that.

It actually occurred the night I met him. These things did happen back then too, it’s just that nobody talked about them. I woke up in bed with him beside me, white as a sheet and shining with a fever. Didn’t know what in God’s name was going on.

The next morning, he said he didn’t either: it was only something that had happened to him since he was a child. Might seem like an odd thing to remember from fifty years or so back, but if you had seen him too that morning, you wouldn’t soon forget it. He spent a few hours out on the balcony smoking, with this kind of darkness cast over him. He couldn’t stop shaking.

But it was a few months before it reared its head again, those were good months for us. The more time passed, the less Antonov seemed to speak about it. Even if I hadn’t heard him in the night, I could always tell by his silence or the way he held his hands.

It wasn’t until we were married that I was able to provide any actual relief for his mind. That’s what I’ve found in my time, anyway; the quietest people often make the best writers.  
So when I was tired of this thing that plagued my husband in his sleep, I suggested he wrote down whatever he could remember – the moment he was up – to try piece together what it was he was remembering. Never did finish that particular puzzle.  
It was cathartic for him, though, to say the least. When I’d see that light on in the hall, I knew he’d be there for hours, writing away until he’d rip the paper.

Once it was done, he would collapse back into bed and finally get some sleep. God bless his soul. He smiled a lot more afterwards, still quiet, still serious, but Christ, there was relief in there too.

I kept everything of his that he wrote, that he hadn’t burned anyway. I suppose it did get bad in the end there, didn’t it? He forgot how to talk, but never to write, never to burn.  
And I have what information he had gathered on his family before – something he started doing alongside recording it all. Perhaps thought it might trigger some memory in him.  
I have his mother’s birth certificate too, that’s hers, hand-written. She was from some place not very many people had heard of, near the feet of the Urals. She moved west during the great thaw, but died fairly soon after. Poor Antonov was destined to be an orphan, I suppose.  
But I don’t imagine you want to hear about that, do you, shall I read the remaining passages?

\- 

‘When we had left in the morning the sky had been full of hope. We had toasted our arrival in Vizhai, more to warm ourselves against the air, which was cutting to the bone, and I had seen Yuri twice now wincing against the cold. His nerves had pained him through the night and I had thought even then that the jokes he was making with the rest of us was only a facade of bravado. I made a silent promise to myself to stay close by his side and give him my own rations of spirits should he have needed them.

I cannot really describe the view before us. The mountains had seemed too ancient and monumental for someone like me, an open wound across the earth I did not want to infect. I think it was then that we realised how molecular we all were, how atomic we had become at the precipice of age, how brief and immaculate human history was – and inevitably when we burn ourselves out of our own fates in nuclear whistling, we will be barely the dust we rose from when the comets had first fallen.

Perhaps, though, the earth will recover from us again. The animals will return from the forest, making their dens in the ruins of our industrialisation. There is a kind of peace in that, I think, a lack of responsibility to God. I would like to think we are only born to watch the sun rise and the sun set and to love in the hours in between. And I did, love her. In the brilliant romance of teenage years, the one night we slept side by side and quivering with the electric haze of a first kiss, a first dance. I had become so swept up in the tides of that feeling I had almost forgotten the knotting in my stomach.

And I remember that so clearly, the blue of the sky where it met the horizon forever, because a pain split the side of my head so suddenly I could not see what could have caused it but the inevitable: I had been shot. My hands were dry of blood. Yuri had stopped to look back at me, most assuredly too to stop the pain in his leg and I realised then how ill he looked, and he looked at me much the same way.

“Some places,” he told me, “are not meant to be found.”

When I asked him what he meant, he shook his head as if I were hallucinating. I think that was where things began to go wrong. 

That is what the sight of the mountains was to us then. The inevitable feeling that something will go wrong. I am aching with worry.’

-

‘The last sign of civilisation we saw was the militsiya waving us off from their skis. They are different here than they are in the cities, sons of farmers and workers, a strange lot. They seem to drink with the people and not over them.

Yura had had to turn back after trouble with his nerves for so long; he took the sled back today so he might not have to stand. While I feel relief for him getting to rest, it had made the trip a little lonelier in his absence. Igor will not be deterred of course, only says he was slowing us down, regardless of the added weight now in our packs.

We had to hire horses out to drag everything up to the North-2 – and how quickly they became covered in the falling snow. They must have known the trail blind to walk like they did. Poor creatures. The heaviness has not dampened anyone’s spirits though.

In fact, when we set up by the old mines the laughter and the drinking were warming us well. That was until Igor would not stop his talk of cosmonautics. He speaks as if he will be the first man on the moon. I do not recall much of what we talked of after that, the fire had set into my bones and I found myself drifting in and out of conversation.’

-

‘Something had awoken me like a beast in the night. Against my good sense, I thought at first it had been that feeling of dread, that intangible burden that seemed mine alone to bear, which had come for me.

But it was quite the opposite. I recall passing over the sleeping bodies sure that I was lighter, softer, than I had been in days. God, what an animal that sickness can be, gnawing away at us inside. I swore I did not think I could be touched by it again.

Instead I walked out of camp and the world overcame me. Cold, unearthly cold, but I did not turn back to find more layers. It was there where the ground plateaued that I saw them. Perhaps two dozen, no more. The sun so far away, the first thing I saw was their breath fogging around them. Their state I could only describe as unnatural.

From what I had seen of the herds driven through winter by nomadic farmers, they were creatures of a marathon, blue-eyed, primitive in their instincts. There looked at me as if they had never seen a living human before. Perhaps they had not.

The deer had stepped closer, grinding down on their teeth like the starved. I wrapped my arms around my chest against the bitterness. If I stayed there longer than I had, I would have presumably frozen to death, and the fact I did not even contract frostbite from the excursion led me to believe it had only been a dream induced by the drinks we had had.

It was their eyes that had shaken me to the core – not only in the fact that they seemed to have no colour at all – but in the manner in which they tracked me. The feeling itself had emanated from the herd, swaying, following me. It was clear that they were not creatures that called themselves prey. Quite the opposite. And their antlers stood from their crowns like lightening and something in me begged, truly, to never see their teeth.

But there was a hand on my shoulder, so light I could barely feel it, and it was Yuri. He was still dressed just as I had last seen him. There had never been a better thing in all the world. That was how he led me, still complaining of his sciatica like it was the daytime, back to the sleeping camp. I covered myself up in my tent and made my hands into fists. I prayed to any atomic form of God, real or imagined, that those things would not follow me.

And Yuri, his work all done, waved me goodbye and walked back off into that terrible darkness. What would be waiting for him, waiting in an impenetrable jungle where no life could grow?

I awoke in the morning as a stiff as a corpse. Igor was brewing tea before we headed out, rolling on the balls of his feet.

“Did you hear anything in the night?” I asked.

“What sort of thing?” he said.

“Anything.”

“No, nothing lives up here to make any sound.” He smiled all of a sudden. “I only heard happy snoring.”’

-

‘Sometimes I must stop to remind myself of all the good things to come. There is rain I will watch from the window, paintings with colours I have never seen, and love letters from people that do not yet know I even exist. This horror of the day by day, it will not last forever. Nothing ever does.

The line of the track ahead looked beautiful between the snow. How many square feet of earth are there that nobody has ever walked on? It sinks into my stomach on days like this. Almost like thinking of all the lives of creatures that lived millions of years before, ones we will never know about, with their secrets locked away in stone. Every life span is so complete around me. I will never know anyone wholly and neither will they know me. But we exist alongside each other like books in a library, some ancient or indecipherable, but none of them incomplete.

I think of the school girls back home that played with string, and how two strings that intersect will never meet again, but those that run perfectly parallel will not meet at all.’

-

‘I could not tell you who saw it first. Not when their faces blurred in my memoires like old photographs.

But they had stopped to point out the light in the sky, crimson and ecclesiastic, and we found ourselves pausing just to watch it. “Like Caesar’s comet.”

“There are no Tsars anymore,” Igor joked.

I do not know how we are even still standing.

Everything had been different that day. A thousand white eyes watched me everywhere I went and I could not help but check the snow for tracks that were not our own. But we had seen nothing all day. A handful of birds and once a wolverine. Even the trees grew shorter and thinner there.

As the air shrank our bodies slowed down, matching one another almost mechanically. And soon the sky turned white.

Nobody spoke when we set up camp that night. It was the first time Zinaida had not been making lover-eyes at Yura. Igor only busied himself with digging through the snow so our tent did not get lost.

The earth is not the same this side of the mountain; all day, the wind was relentless, but as time wears on it has fallen all together. I do not hear Igor across the unlit fire, calling for me. He does not hear me speak back. And the rest of them only watched the trees with a wariness I cannot blame them for.

And so now I lie in my bed and I will not move from it. Not for anything.

From the doorway, a wide mouth of white, I watch as the sun does not set. If anything, it grows brighter and brighter, and the snow is burning my skin.

I reached for the first thing I could find – a torch – and sit listening to the crooked silence until it is tomorrow. My own heartbeat is not making a sound.’

-

‘None of us sleep a wink. My body sits empty and it is not mine completely, more that some ancestor down the line had claimed it for himself. Today, I am overwhelmed with a sensation of fire and realise my clothes are clinging to my back. This warmth had set itself inside of me for hours. When I can bear it no longer, I tear out of my blankets with whatever strength has possessed me.

But the door is an impasse of solid light, the real world does not wait behind it. This is what knives are for.

My body propels itself forward with the certainty of drowning. There, in the realm outside, the snow is white but the sky is not. I find that the stars have fallen out of space and singe whatever it is they have touched. That is how I found Igor, scorched red as clay, with his hands over his eyes, and my voice does not happen when I speak to him.

Half of the camp’s clothes have been left out on the snow with no wind to carry them. Something has tackled me to the ground, I am sure that I remember it.

Beneath my body – blistering, infested with something I do not know the name of – the ice begins to melt at the place it meets me. It must be -20 that night. Igor is still standing like a banshee. It is a lonely state to be in, wanting. I turn on my back in the warm water I have melted. And I cannot help it – this instinct of cognition – as I make snow angles like we did back home.

Something light hits the ground and I think Igor has gone after it. When I manage to get to my feet there is nothing but the sun.

The time is 8:45, it has been for hours.

When I do traipse through what was a caustic light, I see Yura and Yuri barely dressed and making violent conversation. Their mouths move but their throats only hum, and Yura falls to his knees in anger. Yuri’s hands are bleeding badly. Nobody can bear to witness it anymore. They cannot bear the way the lightening shrieks to earth or how Zinaida’s body looks when it is struck by something phantom. And my head, my head feels as if it ought to break.

Igor is back again, mouthing every expletive he had ever heard at the top of his lungs. By 8.45, the sky is blue. My body takes off running without me. I see it go crashing through the snow.

Igor has taken his shoes off and thrown them at stale air. After I have crossed hundreds of footprints, none of them our own, I realise I do not know where I am.

Someone is out there with me in the hollow pass, I am sure to my bones that there is someone else there. They hold out hands to me and I almost expect that it is food they are offering, as uncertain of the visage of the burning man in the snow as I am of them.

But those Samaritan hands take my shoulders and they kiss me on the cheek. I sink back into my body, baptised.

There are no constellations left now, not anymore, but the edges of my periphery ache with those pale pairs of eyes. Perhaps I am going snow-blind. Perhaps I will wake up soon from a fever, and my friends will be there beside me. But, even with my invisible stranger, I am alone. I die the moment my skull is fractured and that is the only mercy I am glad of, that and Yuri being there beside me, even in spirit. That edge of bone becomes a crater into soft flesh, pink and ephemeral as me.

These nights now when I wake I am not plagued by this feeling of not being quite myself. Rather, I am stilling into the bones of what is familial, genetic. And for all the articles and newspapers, there are too few words for what it was up there in the pass. It was only, I assume now, some kind of self-cannibalism of our minds, making us see things that were not there and hear nothing at all. I have lived it a hundred times over and I will live it a hundred more, that I am sure of.

I still find myself burning when the cold sets in. I make snow angels in the winter. And there are days I am not alone in the sense of anything but what is material; I am surrounded by one hundred thousand things at once, all moving forward in their own directions, desperate to cross one another even once to know that there is something else that exists just as much as they do out here in our thermoscopic universe.’

Statement ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re interested I’d definitely check out more about the dyatlov pass incident and Smythe’s feeling of presence on Everest!!  
> My tumblr is @phoebe-fucking-bridgers <3


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